“It’s Just A Phase”.. Or Is It?
Mental illness refers to a wide range of mental health conditions: disorders that affect your mood, thinking and behavior. Some conditions include depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, eating disorders and addictions. Although the symptoms for each individual vary, one thing is for certain: the people that have these disorders did not ask for them. They did not wake up one day and ask for a disease. Mental illnesses are diseases. A disease is defined as a disorder of structure or function in a human, animal, or plant, especially one that produces specific signs or symptoms or that affects a specific location and is not simply a direct result of physical injury. Mental illnesses are directly proportional. They affect one location of your body, the brain. These diseases are no joke.
These disorders originate from a variety of sources. Some are hereditary, while others are accumulated due to a traumatic experience or extreme stress. Often times, war veterans acquire an illness called post traumatic stress disorder, or commonly known as PTSD. This disease stems from fighting in war. People with this disease often experience intense flashbacks, insomniatic nights, extreme stress and anxiety, panic attacks, and many more terrifying symptoms.
As a person with a mental illness, it pains me to hear people talk about depression like it is an emotion. “That movie just made me depressed.” No, that movie did not make you depressed, it made you sad. Depression is not an emotion, but rather a lifestyle. People with depression are not necessarily sad all of the time; rather, they feel every emotion to its fullest extent. When they are happy, you will know. They will be bouncing off the walls and smiling ear to ear, but if the simplest of things happen, like dropping their food on the ground, it has the potential to set them back into that dark hole of depression that everyone stereotypes.
As a whole, mental illnesses are misjudged in today’s society. Adults and children alike are ignorant to the facts of these conditions. The mentally ill did not ask for that life, it was given to them. Mental illness is a serious problem, and deserves awareness.